Killspeak

Do you like zombies? Like arcade games? Want to improve your WPM? Well, there is a way to combine the joy of Land of the Dead, Virtua Cop, and repetitive keyboard drills: Sega’s goof masterpiece, The Typing of the Dead. The game alters the well-known rail shooter The House of the Dead 2 by replacing guns with keyboards. Zombies advance on you with word bubbles floating in the space ahead of them. To defeat them, you need to type that word as quickly and accurately as you can.

For those of us who are lazy and in front of a computer all day, but still have a nagging urge for self-improvement, Typing of the Dead is a great way to avoid work, the out of doors, and other people. It’s a tounge-in-cheek re-purposing of a badly written old arcade game (the voice acting is atrocious) but there’s just enough Mavis Beacon to it that you won’t feel too guilty for sinking an entire afternoon into it.

But Typing is satisfying in a way the Mavis Beacon tutors never were. Landing a long word without making a single error means juggling a walking corpse with bullets. Your skill isn’t a score or a ribbon, but explosions of green blood, the rush of having destroyed a wave of infected, knife-weilding circus chimps. You get the feeling that the home row can really kick some ass.

Typing was developed by the same company responsible for the excellent Jet Grind Radio. Originally released for the Dreamcast (your in-game character carries one strapped to his back), the game seems to have found an audience on the PC, and was popular enough to have been re-released for the PS2 in Japan a few years ago.

The full game is available at HOTU, as a direct download or BitTorrent. Be warned, it comes with a suspicious, warez-fabulous installer and loud sound-effects. (I recommend disabling the music: go to the folder where the game was installed and, in the sound folder, rename the bgm folder to anything other than bgm.)